The most widely employed paradigms for the display of information on computer and mobile screens fall generally into three categories: command line interfaces, where users interact with the computer through successive lines of scrolling text; desktop interfaces, where users navigate content presented in windows that can be moved, stacked, resized, and collapsed; and the smartphone interface, where users navigate in and out of apps represented by a grid of icons on a touch-sensitive screen. Such systems, while employing three different principal methods of input (keyboard, mouse, and touch), share in common the limitation that they facilitate interaction with one application vertical at a time, while generally limiting the ability to view information comparatively, across many applications, and within a broader context.
The ability to display data in time series has been a feature of computer interfaces from their beginning. In file management applications, simple time-ordered lists or arrangements of icons by modification date can convey the concept of sequence. Likewise, in social media applications, time-ordered arrangements of content (e.g., messages posted to a user's social media “feed”) by posting date can convey the concept of sequence.
Computers generally fetch data from a storage device shortly before processing the data on a processing device. If the data are located in a fast storage device near the processing device (e.g., in the processing device's registers or in a data cache co-located with the processing device), the time required to fetch the data from the storage device to the processing device is generally quite brief, and therefore may not be perceptible to the computer's user. On the other hand, if the data are located in a storage device that is relatively slow (e.g., a local hard disk) or is not local to the computer (e.g., a remote storage device accessible via a communication network), the time required to fetch the data from the storage device to the processing device can be lengthy, and therefore can be perceptible to the computer's use. To reduce the user-perceptible latency associated with fetching data, some computers or applications “pre-fetch” data that the processing device is expected to request before the processing device actually requests the data, and store the fetched data in a fast, local storage device (e.g., a “cache”).